


The absence of fear has to be bravery

by JisatsuKatsudon



Series: Sneering Acorn [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Book 1: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Fae & Fairies, Harry Potter Has a Twin, Wrong Boy-Who-Lived (Harry Potter)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-14 16:22:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28798335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JisatsuKatsudon/pseuds/JisatsuKatsudon
Summary: Alexander Remus Potter had decided that he would make his first year at Hogwarts as normal as possible. He wasn’t special after all and in school, Harrison would at least not be able to wake him up at midnight to relay messages of the wild. This year was his. And his alone.If you haven't read 'The name on the tip of his tongue', I'd recommend you to read that first, since it may be impossible to understand without it.Just me messing around with my take on fae. It's basically Harry's story, but in an alternate universe and therefore an alternate storyline.Disclaimer: I'm obviously not J.K. Rowling and every name or thing that you recognize isn't mine.
Series: Sneering Acorn [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2111436
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	The absence of fear has to be bravery

**Author's Note:**

> Heya, welcome back to my work. I decided to continue it after all. A big thanks goes to my Beta sopapilla8. Much love <3
> 
> Anyways, once again: English is not my first language and this is an alternate universe, so if you don't like it, don't read it. Please be nice otherwise. Have fun with the first chapter :))

Alexander Remus Potter had decided that he would make his first year at Hogwarts as normal as possible. He wasn’t special after all and in school, Harrison would at least not be able to wake him up at midnight to relay messages of the wild. This year was his. And his alone. 

The bed wasn’t as hard as it was at home. Wasn’t as hard as it should be. Strangely enough, Alex missed all the differences to his room at home. He missed the whispers and the occasional screams of the forest. He missed his brother waking him up every midnight to talk about a person they both knew nothing about. He even missed the weird things he found around their house. 

There were no stones here which had runes that didn’t exist carved into them. There were no feathers of something that was anything but a bird. And there weren’t corners that had random bits of earth, pebbles, and sand in them. Only boys were here, in the boys’ dormitory, all of them fast asleep. Most of them quietly, but one with hair almost as fair as Luna’s snored loudly. It amused Alex, as the boy was all slick elegance during the day. It had been a week since their departure from home and even if Alex was homesick for things he had hated, he was still glad to be here, to be away from Harry for some of the day. It was suffocating to be the same as someone else. 

Midnight passed and Alex could go back to sleep. 

Herbology had to easily be Harry’s favourite class. The castle was oh so quiet, but oh so loud at the same time. The clean whispers of the plants were a nice addition to the paradox flurry of noises and colours that the castle was made of. The plants hummed and danced under Harry’s hands and if he looked to his left, he could see them do the same for Neville. After all, Alex’s friend had been kissed by the clouds. Insanity lurked behind those friendly brown eyes, insanity that only he could see. Fairy-like creatures seemed to have taken a living in Neville’s blonde hair. Harry grinned and went back to work with his little dancers. 

Potions had also been an interesting experience. The dark man full of lies who led the class had tried to ridicule the green-eyed boy because of his relation to Alex who was also in the room, staring at Snape with a coldness that was normally Harry’s to show. The older boy had giggled into the teacher’s face and had answered correctly, with words that he had never heard before. The room had told him the solutions and in the way Alex bit his lips, he could tell that his twin heard it too. How marvelous. 

Wherever he went, he could hear the laughs of the Slytherins following him. They thought that his necklace looked weird, but it only did to them. Or perhaps they were the only ones brave or stupid enough to remark on it. Harry couldn’t care less. The twisted runes, made of wood and trapped in a glass form that Luna had made for him felt warm to him. Like home. Whenever Alex passed him, the boy stared at his brother’s face as to not have to look at Harry’s necklace. Alex hated it and they both knew it. 

The hatred just fueled the acidic eyed creature watching him. 

Draco Malfoy was officially scared of his roommate’s brother. And of his roommate himself too, if just a bit. Alex always seemed too impassive, his movements too controlled, his eyes flat and unenthusiastic. The boy spent a lot of time with Theo, the two of them having grown close at Halloween when they had snuck away and had returned with passion in their eyes. But even then, Alex seldomly laughed at jokes, simply inclining his head and blinking in that slow way of his. Theo seemed to understand. The two Slytherins spent time with Susan and Neville, two non-Slytherins and if Draco hadn’t felt the fear he was trying to ignore, he would have mocked them endlessly. 

His roommate’s brother had seemed nice, if a bit unhinged. The light-haired boy had been reluctantly impressed at the way the boy had handled Severus, his godfather. Over the course of the week, he hadn’t been able to leave his eyes of the pretty, green-eyed boy. Something attracted him. Maybe it was the taste of wilderness or the smell of the ocean that kept him hooked. Or maybe it was the smirks that hid behind the boy’s glasses and the casual movement the boy always made to tuck his hair out of his face. Whatever it was, it was distracting the Malfoy heir from his studies. 

The days had grown darker and the feeling of thunder wracking through the castle woke Draco increasingly often. He often held his breath and peeked out from the curtains surrounding his bed to see Alex rigid in his bed, green eyes wide open and unmoving. Then, a faraway clock rang twelve times, and the thunder passed, leaving nothing but exhaustion in its wake. The dragon that Hagrid hatched in his little, pathetic house smelled of thunder too and Draco snuck out at night to find out if the two were related. Detention with Harry in a dark forest was really the last thing he would have wanted, even if the smaller boy took his hand and readily pulled him into the woods. “Oh, a pretty unicorn”, he commented with a smile, looking at Draco as if he didn’t smell the blood in the air and saw the dark creature coming at them. Magic pulsed around them and everything was gone in a heartbeat. 

Draco wasn’t going near the boys with the killing-curse eyes ever again. 

The house seemed colder and it wasn’t just because it was Yule and had snow outside. The walls were darker, he thought, and the door smiled at him, daring him to go outside. Alex stopped after a step, blinked, and turned to a grinning Harry. “Stop it.” Then he left to help his mother and Remus with dinner. The older boy stared at the door. “What a shame, it almost worked.” 

Presents were always an interesting thing in the Potter manor. Sirius and Remus loved their godchildren to bits and tended to spoil them. They knew what both boys were interested in and so, Harry got an ancient tomb, full of forgotten runes and Alex got a book full of relatively safe and relatively unknown curses. He was fairly sure that both were dark books, but he thanked them with a smile and ignored the way Harry blew the foul air his way. He got a runestone from his brother, no surprise there, except that he even understood the rune, for once. It wasn’t twisted or wild. “Hope”, he murmured and Harry licked his lips. Their parents gifted them brooms for when they made ‘the team’ the next year and Alex was fairly sure his was going to rot in a corner. Harry loved being like a bird and Alex hated it as a consequence. 

“Why Slytherin?” The question wasn’t judgemental, merely curious. Surprisingly, it was Sirius who dared to ask, his usual mischief banned from his face and leaving space for...something else. His face was neither cold nor warm. Lukewarm. “Because I told the hat that I wanted to get out from under Harry’s shadow”, he answered, with no inclination in his tone. He frankly didn’t care about their opinions about Slytherins in general. “You two are the same. There is no shadow.” Sirius sounded way too defensive. “No, I live in the forgotten light and the silver snakes might help with that.” Alex wondered when the wild had started to sneak into his words too and let him say things he didn’t understand. "Do you know why he put Harry into Gryffindor?", Sirius asked with the same plain curiosity, not about to his words. "Because Harry's brave", Alex answered. 

The absence of fear had to be bravery, right?

“You’re very powerful”, Dumbledore stated, looking at Alex with a grandfatherly smile. The boy wondered if the headmaster had a chat with every student. “Which makes sense, after all, you’re the boy-who-lived.” Before coming to school, Alex hadn’t even known something like that existed and much less that he had the questionable honour of having such a title. At the time Yule came around, the whispers had mostly stopped and Alex had conveniently forgotten about this saviour thing again, until now. Right. The headmaster didn’t have a chat with every student. The smile of the old man smelled rotten and Alex let his eyes wander away from him and over the oddities in the man’s office. Everything in the man’s office was pure and so far away from the wild, that Alex felt like a stranger. Even more so than he felt in the clutches of cold magic holding him back from his brother’s world. The boy didn’t answer, he simply blinked at the headmaster.

“An excellent student too”, the man continued, seemingly not caring that the boy wasn’t responsive in the slightest. “Top of the year.” Alex let the voice fade to the background, only humming in agreement from time to time. Instead, he thought of his best friend. Neville was okay, but Alex felt that something was off and it scared him. Susan was a nice person, but she had distanced herself a bit. He was sure that it was because he had joined the snake pit. No, his best friend was full of glittering rays of sunshine, laughter like a waterfall, and curiosity that didn’t stop for anything, not even for dark or forbidden magic. 

Most importantly, Theodore Nott was his. His alone. He had never been and would never be Harry’s. Alex had told him about some of their secrets. He had told him about the call of the wild and Harry’s and Luna’s essence and about the twisted things the wild left as tokens in their house. He told him about the language of the forest. He even told him about the hatred of magic and that he had to battle against it every time he wanted to force out a spell from his wand. He and Theo both knew that the twins were both insanely magically talented and Nott, the son of the dark house, had expressed how impressed he was that even though Alex had to fight so hard he still showed such good results. “Imagine which results you’d have if...” If magic didn’t hate him. 

If he didn’t have to pay for taking a life that had been lost as a sacrifice. 

It was a normal evening. Correction, it had been a normal evening. Harry stood in the common room, smiling gently and maliciously at all the students staring at him. They were all clad in green, black, and silver uniforms, with Harry being the odd one out. “Damn it, Potter, why did you let your brother in?”, one of the prefects almost yelled at the younger twin. Only the composure he, as a prefect had to keep around non-Slytherins, stopped him from outright threatening Alex. “I didn’t”, the boy answered, his impassive green eyes turning towards his brother. The two had a non-verbal conversation in the middle of the room and the tension grew and grew until everyone stopped breathing. Only then did Harry walk through the ghost between the brothers to grab Alex’s hand and pull him after him. Nobody stopped them when they left the common room. 

Harry never explained to Alex or Theo who had followed them to the forbidden corridor. He didn’t have to, both knew that something was calling him. They could feel it too, as an uncomfortable hissing settling in their stomach pits. Harry lifted his voice and they had to press their hands to their ears when the boy put the Cerberus to sleep with a song of the wild. Alex didn’t ask how he knew how to do that, he could taste the whispers in the room. Before he jumped through the trap door, he saw the earth, pebbles, and sand under the dog’s paws. 

The devil’s snare danced away from them as if she had been burned. The key fluttered into Harry’s hand. The chess pieces bowed and let them pass. The next room was empty, save for splatters on the wall. None of the boys wanted to know what it consisted of. The last room seemed like the most dangerous one. Theo watched as the twins moved in such sync that it sent shivers down his spines. They held hands at this point and reached out to the same vial at the same time. Only Harry drank from it, but he simply pulled Alex after himself and the magic didn’t seem willing to stop them, even if even Theo could feel the cold spikes of her hatred. The boy decided to do the sensible thing and go get help.

“You came”, Professor Quirrel said and the boys smiled simultaneously, even if Alex didn’t feel like mirroring his brother. It just happened and he could feel his blood rush through him. The brothers didn’t answer, they just went up to the mirror. “Erised”, Harry whispered, before suddenly and sharply turning his head to look at thin air. “Nicholas”, he murmured. Quirrel’s eyes glittered with greed. “Yes, Nicholas Flamel.” If Alex had to draw disdain, he’d draw his brother’s eyes at that moment. “Some things are bigger than you, Dark Lord.” Alex could tell that they weren’t his brother’s words. Yet another thing they didn’t understand. 

Quirrel hissed and obeyed when a thin voice ordered him to let them talk to the boys. “Alexander. The boy-who-lived”, the abomination commented, right before Harry went to the mirror and pulled a stone out of it. “The stone of the death-cheating man”, Alex breathed, realizing what it was without knowing why. He too was ignoring the big, bad guy by then. Maybe he was getting too much like his brother. The thought made him gasp and he decided that he was now scared of Voldemort. Fear fluttered out of his eyes and he saw Harry flinch back from the foul smell of the made-up emotion. “I told you Lily built our lies”, the older twin said in a detached voice. 

Quirrel, or Voldemort, or Voldemort and Quirrel were sick of being ignored. They launched themselves at Alex, but they didn’t get far. For once, his brother had nothing to do with it. Harry too was left staring, when a horned, winged person manifested between them. “Leave him alone.” The voice sounded dead and alive at the same time. It filled the room with an echo, the smell of the woods and the dancing form of other, formerly invisible ghosts. The Potters stared as the creature floated and the thing that was Quirrel and his head decoration wasn’t able to stop it. The brothers stared. They stood as still as the trees had when they’d been home at Yule. None of them moved. They stared. The creature ripped Quirrel apart while the observers watched impassively. Then, the ghosts faded away before they could even thank him. Harry held the stone a bit closer to his chest, while worlds away, Luna woke up with a scream. Alex blinked. 

“Well, at least I can tell Luna now that we can look at the Thestrals together next year”, was all Harry said.


End file.
